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Saturday, April 30, 2011

Britain’s Royal Wedding: A Big Day For The Global OligarchyA Celebration of the Dictatorship of Global Capital over Democracy

by Finian Cunningham

The British royal wedding can be seen as a modern-day repeat of the “bread and circuses” policy of ancient Rome. In the waning days of that empire, the rulers sought to distract the masses from their grinding misery and the unwieldy wealth and corruption of the elite by sporadically throwing scraps of bread to the hungry public while saturating them with spectacles of gore and bloodlust at the Colosseum.

Today, the British public – grinding under massive austerity budget cuts, unemployment, poverty wages, social deprivations and crumbling services – are thrown scraps of feelgood comfort from the much-hyped wedding between Prince William and his girlfriend Kate Middleton. William is the grandson of Queen Elizabeth II and son of the heir apparent to the British throne, Prince Charles. Fawning media coverage will present it as a day of romance, nationhood, nostalgia and pride.

Meanwhile, the spectacles of gore and bloodlust – admittedly despite much public opposition – are located thousands of kilometers away in the Middle East, Iraq, Central Asia, Afghanistan, where over a million civilians have been killed in British-backed “wars against terror” that have yet to be sated even after eight and 10 years of butchery, respectively; and now the latest spectacle opens in North Africa, Libya, where over the past six weeks Royal Air Force warplanes have been bombing and killing civilians in the name of “peace” and “humanitarian concern”. The day before the wedding, the British government announced that troops are to be dispatched to the borders of Libya to provide “humanitarian corridors” for displaced civilians – many of whom will have been displaced by RAF ground attack aircraft.

Of course, the British Empire has long ago waned as a singular entity and its elite is not alone in lording over their masses. The same bread and circuses charade is being played out in varied ways by the other Western powers, the US, France, Germany, Italy, that comprise today’s global Empire of Capital.

But what should be appreciated from the display in Britain is the revelation – albeit unintended – of raw state power. Behind the translucent wedding veil, what can be seen is raw state power that blows away any vestige of illusions of parliamentary democracy, illusions that are not just peculiar to Britain, but to all the Western powers. In short, the empire of corporate and financial aristocracy that has emerged in late capitalism is now asserting itself increasingly and more blatantly as a dictatorship of Capital.

All political parties, whether Conservative, Liberal or Labour in Britain, or Republican, Democrat in the US etc., are seen to be willing servants of this dictatorship.

Bear in mind that London’s royal pageant is being imposed, without any public question, at an estimated cost of some $70 million, most of that for state security against any sign of popular protest. When the wider cost to the economy of the British government’s declared “public holiday” is factored in, the total cost may be $10 billion – this as the British exchequer is embarking on implementing austerity budget cuts of $130 billion. The bill for the royal wedding will be footed by the British public through future deeper cuts in jobs, education and health services, and social welfare programmes. This as the British government unilaterally adds to the public debt the cost of RAF bombing sorties in Libya, estimated at over $1 billion a month, and its other even more costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So where is the democracy in that? Austerity budgets imposed against public will, a deficit substantially increased from a royal pageant imposed without democratic consultation, and war expenses loaded on to the suffering public – even though these wars are opposed by the majority of voters.

That is dictatorship by elite government for an unelected elite. The same dictatorship manifests in the US and other Western powers. Ordinary Americans in particular may look at the British royal wedding pageant with mild fascination as some kind of “old Europe curiosity”. But in spite of its supposed revolution against European monarchs, the US has today reinvented its own corporate and financial aristocracy that rules and plunders without democratic accountability in alliance with the oligarchies of Europe.

The real world nexus for our global oligarchy is seen graphically in the power of oil companies and the transnational banking system. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, one of the world’s top 10 richest individuals, has a personal fortune that is reckoned to far exceed her country’s $130 billion deficit cuts. She is a major shareholder in Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum – these companies along with Exxon and Chevron make up the “four horsemen” of global Big Oil.

The war in Afghanistan was planned long before 9/11, that war and Iraq too, wars were planned we haven’t even started yet and certainly will never live to finish. War is a business and creating war, manufacturing reasons for war including staging acts of terrorism and promoting worldwide strife is seen by “insiders” as “business as usual.”

If you wonder why those who start wars never fight them, why their children never fight them and why everyone around them grows rich and fat from war, you haven’t been paying attention. There is nothing to wonder about.

Today, an Afghan pilot killed 9 of his NATO allies. This story is a breaking one as is the announcement of the musical chairs in Washington’s “land of deceit,” Panetta going to DOD and Petraeus to CIA. These two stories and every other one, from the spurious collection of “cherry picked” and, as we now learn again, censored Wikileaks, to the endless reports, scares and conspiracies that pour into our heads the second we choose to expose ourselves to any type of media, these stories are worse than any narcotic.

Drinking poison would be safe, perhaps healthier too.

After 10 years in Afghanistan, nobody is really asking why we are there, we simply pick up the body bags and deliver the cash. I am told we haul out tons of heroin in the process, but we can let that go for now. The devastation of the drug trade that the corrupt press is told to blames on the Taliban, an idiotic assertion to anyone with common sense, is a minor issue. This year, that “minor issue” will generate $80 billion dollars in revenue. The Afghan heroin trade has its own air force and, most important of all, may be one of the largest banking and investment firms in the world, centered in Zurich, Dubai, Tel Aviv and New York.

Imagine that people are supposed to believe the Taliban do this?

This week, while Wikileaks is telling us that “terrorists” have hidden a nuclear weapon in Europe somewhere, set to go off at any time and has reconfirmed the usual rubbish, chickenfeed and carefully ‘seeded’ war mongering, congress has been discussion billions stolen by military contracting firms. (Intelligence reports indicate that the nuclear threat is greatest at airports managed by a company called ICTS. Heathrow was mentioned.)

Don’t mistake the former soldiers working for these firms as at fault. In fact, most of these firms were created specifically to bilk the government out of money, set up by political types, staffers, party officials and big contributors as conduits for fraud...

“Global warming alarmists and their allies in the media were ringing the alarm bells last summer after a study in the journal Nature claimed the global phytoplankton population had declined by 40% since 1950. The alarmists and their media allies aggressively focused attention on the study and made the additional assertion that global warming and carbon dioxide emissions must be to blame.

A just-released follow-up study in Nature, however, shows flaws in the original study and documents that the global phytoplankton population has risen, rather than fallen, over the past several decades. Perhaps the alarmists and their media allies could be given a pass, except they should have known the truth even last summer.

The theory advanced by global warming alarmists is that carbon dioxide emissions, the alleged instigator of the modest rise in 20th century temperatures, cause oceans to become harmfully acidic. Even a small increase in ocean acidity, the alarmists claim, can have devastating impact on marine life. This ocean acidification theory is very convenient for global warming alarmists because it allows them to claim a major global warming-related crisis even when global temperatures fail to rapidly rise or rise in a manner that does not produce temperature-related crises."

Hypocritical pediatricians push for stricter chemical laws at the same time they inject babies with toxic vaccines
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently issued a policy paper condemning the current Toxic Substances Control Act (TSC Act) for failing to properly regulate the tens of thousands of toxic chemicals used in various consumer products, many of which are especially dangerous to pregnant women and young children. Though correct in its identification of chemical use as a toxic threat to society's most vulnerable individuals, the AAP hypocritically continues to support the intramuscular poisoning of children through vaccinations, which are loaded with toxic chemicals that are directly injected into children's bodies.

Several different groups have been pushing in recent years to have the TSC Act amended because it has utterly failed to keep tabs on the thousands of new chemicals introduced every single year in the US. Currently, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) only requires safety testing of some 200 chemicals, while thousands of others are specifically exempted. And the EPA does not even properly test chemicals before approving them, anyway -- it is basically a system of "safe until proven dangerous," except the only ones doing the "proving" are the chemical companies themselves (http://www.naturalnews.com/029390_c...).

"Children are not little adults," said Dr. Jerome Paulson, a member of the AAP's Council on Environmental Health, to Reuters Health, noting that children are most affected by chemical exposure. "Their bodies are different and their behaviors are different. That means that their exposures to chemicals in the environment are different, and the way their bodies (break down) those chemicals are different."

Paulson is right, which is what makes AAP's stance on childhood vaccinations highly concerning. How can a group that openly condemns environmental chemical exposure continue to endorse chemical exposure via childhood vaccinations? AAP is so in favor of vaccinations that it actually holds the yearly "National Infant Immunization Week," which happens to be going on at the same time as the group's open condemnation of the TSA Act.

Vaccines, as most NaturalNews readers already know, are loaded with toxic chemicals like aluminum hydroxide, artificial dyes, formaldehyde, ethanol, Sorbitol, and Thimerosal (mercury) -- all of which are pumped directly into human tissue (http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pi...).

On the one hand, AAP is right. Environmental chemicals are highly dangerous and need better regulation. But so are the medically sanctioned chemicals used in vaccines, which are linked to innumerable diseases and conditions (http://www.naturalnews.com/vaccines...).

The ABA Journal gives us the lowdown on the latest news from April Gallop's 9/11 lawsuit against Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. in ‘Fantastical’ 9/11 Lawsuit Could Lead to Sanctions for Lawyer, 2nd Circuit Says.
The three person appellate court panel, which includes George Bush cousin John M. Walker, continues the criminal cover up in their decision of April 27 not only affirming the dismissal of the suit {pdf} as frivolous but also "Gallop and her counsel are hereby ordered to show cause in writing within thirty days from the date of entry of this order why they should not pay double costs and damages in the amount of $15,000, for which they would be jointly and severally liable."

In the written ruling the judges made sure to include various terms such as “cynical delusion and fantasy,” "fantastical," “factually frivolous,” “fanciful,” “delusional,” as well as reinforcing the official myth of “agents of the al Qaeda terrorist organization hijacked commercial airplanes and attacked the World Trade Center in New York City and the national headquarters of the Department of Defense in Arlington, Virginia.”

The monetary sanction that the 'court' is trying to impose against Gallop and her lawyer is an attempt to set a precedent and scare away any future lawsuits and the lawyers that may bring them. This is only a few steps away from actually sending someone to prison for questioning the 'official' tale. It reminds me of Ernst Zundel's lawyer, Sylvia Stolz, who was just released from a German prison for the crime of 'defending her client.' Think this sort of thing couldn't happen here? "The big lie" must be protected at all costs.

What is really fantastical about 9/11 is that almost 10 years later we still hear the same old lies from the government and media and there has been no justice. The real perps are still free and counting their money.

Three Convicted in Terror-Related Cases Later Granted U.S. Citizenship by Obama Administration

By Edwin Mora

Three people convicted of crimes as a result of a terrorism-related investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) were later naturalized as U.S. citizens by the Obama administration, according to federal auditors.

The March 2011 audit (released on April 21, 2011) by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), entitled Criminal Alien Statistics: Information on Incarcerations, Arrests and Costs, shows that three individuals were among “defendants where the investigation involved an identified link to international terrorism but they were charged with violating other statutes [not directly related to terrorism], including fraud, immigration, drugs, false statements, and general conspiracy charges,” referred by DOJ as Category II terrorism-related cases.

The three individuals in question can be found in a DOJ list of unsealed terrorism-related investigations conducted from Sept. 11, 2001 through Mar. 18, 2010. There are 403 defendants on that list of which, according to the GAO, at least 43 percent were aliens--both legal (26 percent) and illegal (17 percent)--at the time they were charged with crimes.

“Prosecuting terror-related targets using Category II offenses and others is often an effective method--and sometimes the only available method--of deterring and disrupting potential terrorist planning and support activities,” explained the DOJ in the document that listed the defendants.

Staff members of GAO's Homeland Security and Justice team who worked on the audit told CNSNews.com in an e-mail that the three individuals were naturalized as U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama.

“One of the individuals was naturalized in late 2009. The other two were naturalized in 2010,” says the e-mail from the GAO.

Excessive Leverage Helped Cause the Great Depression and the Current Crisis … And Government Responds by Encouraging MORE Leverage

It is well known that excessive leverage was one of the primary causes of the Great Depression. Specifically, many people bought stocks on margin, and when stock prices dropped, they were wiped out and their lenders got hit hard.

Banks also used leverage in the Roaring Twenties, but things have only gotten worse since then. As David Miles – Monetary Policy Committee Member of the Bank of England – noted this week:

Between 1880 and 1960 bank leverage was – on average – about half the level of recent decades. Bank leverage has been on an upwards trend for 100 years; the average growth of the economy has shown no obvious trend.

Indeed, as the New York Sun pointed out in 2008, the former director of the SEC’s trading and markets division blamed repeal of leverage rules as the cause of the Great Recession:

The Securities and Exchange Commission can blame itself for the current crisis. That is the allegation being made by a former SEC official, Lee Pickard, who says a rule change in 2004 led to the failure of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch.

The SEC allowed five firms — the three that have collapsed plus Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — to more than double the leverage they were allowed to keep on their balance sheets and remove discounts that had been applied to the assets they had been required to keep to protect them from defaults.

Making matters worse, according to Mr. Pickard, who helped write the original rule in 1975 as director of the SEC’s trading and markets division, is a move by the SEC this month to further erode the restraints on surviving broker-dealers by withdrawing requirements that they maintain a certain level of rating from the ratings agencies.

“They constructed a mechanism that simply didn’t work,” Mr. Pickard said. “The proof is in the pudding — three of the five broker-dealers have blown up.”

The so-called net capital rule was created in 1975 to allow the SEC to oversee broker-dealers, or companies that trade securities for customers as well as their own accounts. It requires that firms value all of their tradable assets at market prices, and then it applies a haircut, or a discount, to account for the assets’ market risk. So equities, for example, have a haircut of 15%, while a 30-year Treasury bill, because it is less risky, has a 6% haircut.

The net capital rule also requires that broker dealers limit their debt-to-net capital ratio to 12-to-1, although they must issue an early warning if they begin approaching this limit, and are forced to stop trading if they exceed it, so broker dealers often keep their debt-to-net capital ratios much lower.

Many economists recognize the danger of excessive leverage. For example, on April 18th, Anat R. Admati – Professor of Finance and Economics at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University – wrote:

Housing policies alone, however, would not have led to the near insolvency of many banks and to the credit-market freeze. The key to these effects was the excessive leverage that pervaded, and continues to pervade, the financial industry. The [Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission] reports mention this, but they fail to point out how government policies created incentives for leverage, and how the government failed to control it before and during the crisis. Excessive leverage is a source of great fragility. It increases the chances that an institution goes into distress, which interferes with credit provision. And, particularly in the presence of any guarantees, high leverage encourages excessive risk taking.

When do you think they will tell us about this? Once word gets out, they will deny it exists...

Ex-Rad, the U.S. Military's Radiation Wonder Drug

By Van Hipp

In what has to be one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of military medicine, the U. S. military has developed a radiation protection drug known as Ex-Rad that can give protection through DNA repair against otherwise lethal dosages of radiation. Ex-Rad, which is administered as an injection or orally, can be given either before or after exposure. While Ex-Rad officials are continuing to work with the FDA, it has successfully cleared two clinical studies showing it is safe.

During most of the last decade, U.S. military scientists at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute have worked with some of the best scientists in the American private sector to develop this radiation protection wonder drug.

As someone who’s had the privilege to interact with these scientists over the years and watch the development of Ex-Rad, I’ve seen it grow from just a dream into a very real capability that can save lives.

Unfortunately, due to a lack of media awareness about its development in the U.S., Ex-Rad is probably the most important new drug the American public has never heard of. But thanks to the public writings of senior scientists from the U.S. Department of Defense, the private sector, and the prestigious Radiation Effects Research Foundation (based in Hiroshima, Japan) the secret about this breakthrough drug is finally getting out. And it’s happening not a moment too soon.

The U.S. Army recently recommended to the Office of the Secretary of Defense that Ex-Rad be stockpiled for the benefit of our military. That puts the ball in the court of Pentagon leadership to make certain one of military medicine’s most successful achievements in recent years is fully realized and able to benefit Americans.

With our nation facing a litany of threats today, American scientists at government agencies including the Departments of Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services among others are developing mature technologies and counter-measures with the potential to save millions of lives. Many of these life-saving discoveries have positive and far-reaching implications well beyond the narrow scope of that particular department. Ex-Rad is just latest example of medical innovation being developed by our military. Although we don't hear about it, we need to hear more and we to support it.

The challenge for the Obama administration is to ensure that these various efforts are well coordinated and communicated throughout the government – and that the American taxpayers are ultimately provided the return they deserve on their hefty investment.

In times of tragedy, there always seems to be hucksters about trying to use that tragedy to sell a position, a product, or a belief. In ancient times, tragedy was the impetus used to appease the gods and to embrace religion to save yourselves. In light of this article on the Daily Caller Center for American Progress blames Republicans for devastating tornadoes it seems some opportunists just can’t break the pattern of huckster behavior in the face of disaster.

I can’t think of a more disgusting example of political opportunism that has occurred such as we witnessed today from The Center for American Progress via their Think Progress blog, as well as the New York Times op-ed piece that suggests predicting severe weather is little more than a guessing game. Certified Consulting Meteorologist Mike Smith of Wichita, KS based WeatherData Inc. said of the NYT piece:

The cruelty of this particular April, in the number of tornadoes recorded, is without equal in the United States.

This may or may not be true. The statement is at least premature. The NWS Storm Prediction Center March 8th changed its methodology which allows more reports of tornadoes and other severe storms to be logged (see first note here). We don’t know yet whether this is a record April.

Tornadoes in particular, researchers say, straddle the line between the known and the profoundly unknowable.

“There’s a large crapshoot aspect,” said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

To add to the mix, Peter Gleick says at the Huffington Post “More extreme and violent climate is a direct consequence of human-caused climate change (whether or not we can determine if these particular tornado outbreaks were caused or worsened by climate change).”

In the Think Progress piece, again, Dr. Trenberth is quoted:

“Given that global warming is unequivocal,” climate scientist Kevin Trenberth cautioned the American Meteorological Society in January of this year, “the null hypothesis should be that all weather events are affected by global warming rather than the inane statements along the lines of ‘of course we cannot attribute any particular weather event to global warming.’”

It should also be noted that during that AMS conference in January, Dr. Trenberth called people who disagreed with that view “deniers” in front of hundreds of scientists, even after being called out on the issue he left the hateful term intact in his speech. Clearly, he is a man with a bias. From my perspective, these articles citing Trenberth are opportunistic political hucksterism at its finest. Unfortunately, many from these bastions of left leaning opininators don’t bother to cite some inconvenient facts, leaving their claims to be on par with superstitions that were the part of our dark past.

The following information comes from the FDIC’s site for the week closing April 29th. The total loss to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) and loss-share tranactions is $964.50 million.
Information for Community Central Bank, Mount Clemens, MI

The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) will be $183.2 million. Compared to other alternatives, Talmer Bank & Trust’s acquisition was the least costly resolution for the FDIC’s DIF. Community Central Bank is the 39th FDIC-insured institution to fail in the nation this year, and the second in Michigan. The last FDIC-insured institution closed in the state was Peoples State Bank, Hamtramck, on February 11, 2011.
Bank of the Ozarks, Little Rock, Arkansas, Acquires All the Deposits of Two Georgia Banks

The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) for First Choice Community Bank will be $92.4 million; and for The Park Avenue Bank, $306.1 million. Bank of the Ozarks’ acquisition of all the deposits of the two institutions was the “least costly” option for the DIF compared to all alternatives.
Premier American Bank, National Association, Miami, Florida, Acquires All the Deposits of Two Florida Banks

The FDIC and Premier American Bank, N.A. entered into loss-share transactions on the failed banks’ assets. The loss-share transaction for First National Bank of Central Florida was $270.0 million; and the loss-share transaction for Cortez Community Bank was $51.3 million. Premier American Bank, N.A. will share in the losses on the asset pools covered under the loss-share agreements. The loss-share transactions are projected to maximize returns on the assets covered by keeping them in the private sector. The transactions also are expected to minimize disruptions for loan customers. For more information on loss share, please visit: http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/lossshare/index.html.
Information for First National Bank of Central Florida, Winter Park, FL

The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) for First National Bank of Central Florida will be $42.9 million; and for Cortez Community Bank, $18.6 million. Premier American Bank, N.A.’s acquisition of all the deposits of the two institutions was the “least costly” option for the DIF compared to all alternatives.

by Charles Davis
Ron Paul is far from perfect, but I'll say this much for the Texas congressman: He has never authorized a drone strike in Pakistan. He has never authorized the killing of dozens of women and children in Yemen. He hasn't protected torturers from prosecution and he hasn't overseen the torturous treatment of a 23-year-old young man for the "crime" of revealing the government's criminal behavior.

Can the same be said for Barack Obama?

Yet, ask a good movement liberal or progressive about the two and you'll quickly be informed that yeah, Ron Paul's good on the war stuff – yawn – but otherwise he's a no-good right-wing reactionary of the worst order, a guy who'd kick your Aunt Beth off Medicare and force her to turn tricks for blood-pressure meds. By contrast, Obama, war crimes and all, provokes no such visceral distaste. He's more cosmopolitan, after all; less Texas-y. He's a Democrat. And gosh, even if he's made a few mistakes, he means well.

Sure he's a murderer, in other words, but at least he's not a Republican!

Put another, even less charitable way: Democratic partisans – liberals – are willing to trade the lives of a couple thousand poor Pakistani tribesman in exchange for a few liberal catnip-filled speeches and NPR tote bags for the underprivileged. The number of party-line progressives who would vote for Ron Paul over Barack Obama wouldn't be enough to fill Conference Room B at the local Sheraton, with even harshest left-leaning critics of the president, like Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, saying they'd prefer the mass-murdering sociopath to that kooky Constitution fetishist.

As someone who sees the electoral process as primarily a distraction, something that diverts energy and attention from more effective means of reforming the system, I don't much care if people don't vote for Ron Paul. In fact, if you're going to vote, I'd rather you cast a write-in ballot for Emma Goldman. But! I do have a problem with those who imagine themselves to be liberal-minded citizens of the world casting their vote for Barack Obama and propagating the notion that someone can bomb and/or militarily occupy Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Libya and still earn more Progressive Points than the guy who would, you know, not do any of that.

Let's just assume the worst about Paul: that he's a corporate libertarian in the Reason magazine/Cato Institute mold that would grant Big Business and the financial industry license to do whatever the hell it wants with little in the way of accountability (I call this scenario the "status quo"). Let's say he dines on Labradoodle puppies while using their blood to scribble notes in the margins of his dog-eared, gold-encrusted copy of Atlas Shrugged.

So. Fucking. What.

Barack Obama isn't exactly Eugene Debs, after all. Hell, he's not even Jimmy Carter. The facts are: he's pushed for the largest military budget in world history, given trillions of dollars to Wall Street in bailouts and near-zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve, protected oil companies like BP from legal liability for environmental damages they cause – from poisoning the Gulf to climate change – and mandated that all Americans purchase the U.S. health insurance industry's product. You might argue Paul's a corporatist, but there's no denying Obama's one.

And at least Paul would – and this is important, I think – stop killing poor foreigners with cluster bombs and Predator drones. Unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner-in-chief, Paul would also bring the troops home from not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Europe, Korea and Okinawa. There'd be no need for a School of the Americas because the U.S. wouldn't be busy training foreign military personnel the finer points of human rights abuses. Israel would have to carry out its war crimes on its own dime.

Even on on the most pressing domestic issues of the day, Paul strikes me as a hell of a lot more progressive than Obama. Look at the war on drugs: Obama has continued the same failed prohibitionist policies as his predecessors, maintaining a status quo that has placed 2.3 million – or one in 100 – Americans behind bars, the vast majority African-American and Hispanic. Paul, on the other hand, has called for ending the drug war and said he would pardon non-violent offenders, which would be the single greatest reform a president could make in the domestic sphere, equivalent in magnitude to ending Jim Crow.

Paul would also stop providing subsidies to corporate agriculture, nuclear energy and fossil fuels, while allowing class-action tort suits to proceed against oil and coal companies for the environmental damage they have wrought. Obama, by contrast, is providing billions to coal companies under the guise of "clean energy" – see his administration's policies on carbon capture and sequestration, the fossil fuel-equivalent of missile defense – and promising billions more so mega-energy corporations can get started on that "nuclear renaissance" we've all heard so much about. And if Paul really did succeed in cutting all those federal departments he talks about, there's nothing to prevent states and local governments – and, I would hope, alternative social organizations not dependent on coercion – from addressing issues such as health care and education. Decentralism isn't a bad thing.

All that aside, though, it seems to me that if you're going to style yourself a progressive, liberal humanitarian, your first priority really ought to be stopping your government from killing poor people. Second on that list? Stopping your government from putting hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens in cages for decades at a time over non-violent "crimes" committed by consenting adults. Seriously: what the fuck? Social Security's great and all I guess, but not exploding little children with cluster bombs – shouldn't that be at the top of the Liberal Agenda?

Over half of Americans' income taxes go to the military-industrial complex and the costs of arresting and locking up their fellow citizens. On both counts, Ron Paul's policy positions are far more progressive than those held – and indeed, implemented – by Barack Obama. And yet it's Paul who's the reactionary of the two?

My sweeping, I'm hoping overly broad assessment: liberals, especially the pundit class, don't much care about dead foreigners. They're a political problem at best – will the Afghan war derail Obama's re-election campaign? – not a moral one. And liberals are more than willing to accept a few charred women and children in some country they'll never visit in exchange for increasing social welfare spending by 0.02 percent, or at least not cutting it by as much as a mean 'ol Rethuglican.

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum, for example, has chastised anti-Obama lefties, complaining that undermining – by way of accurately assessing and commenting upon – a warmonger of the Democratic persuasion is "extraordinarily self-destructive" to all FDR-fearing lefties.

"Just ask LBJ," Drum added. The historical footnote he left out: That LBJ was run out of office by the anti-war left because the guy was murdering hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. But mass murder is no reason to oppose a Democratic president, at least not if you're a professional liberal.

There are exceptions: Just Foreign Policy's Robert Naiman has a piece in Truth Out suggesting the anti-war left checking out Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico who's something of a Ron Paul-lite. But for too many liberals, it seems partisanship and the promise – not even necessarily the delivery, if you've been reading Obama's die-hard apologists – of infinitesimally more spending on domestic programs is more important than saving the lives of a few thousand innocent women and children who happen to live outside the confines of the arbitrary geopolitical entity known as the United States.

Another reason to root – if not vote – for Ron Paul: if there was a Republican in the White House, liberals just might start caring about the murder of non-Americans again.

Friday, April 29, 2011

Tornadoes whipped up by wind, not climate: officialsUS meteorologists warned Thursday it would be a mistake to blame climate change for a seeming increase in tornadoes in the wake of deadly storms that have ripped through the US south.

"If you look at the past 60 years of data, the number of tornadoes is increasing significantly, but it's agreed upon by the tornado community that it's not a real increase," said Grady Dixon, assistant professor of meteorology and climatology at Mississippi State University...

Wednesday's deadly tornadoes, according to Imy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were unusual for being "long track," meaning they were on the ground for a longer period of time than usual -- in this case, roiling across the land for 30 miles (48 kilometers) or more.

An average track would be less than five miles, said Imy.

However, the stronger-than-usual tornadoes affecting the southern states were actually predicted from examining the planet's climatological patterns, specifically those related to the La Nina phenomenon.
"We knew it was going to be a big tornado year," he said. But the key to that tip-off was unrelated to climate change: "It is related to the natural fluctuations of the planet."

Rather than judicially review significant evidence in the events of September 11, 2001, on April 27, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s dismissal of an Army Specialist’s complaint against former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers.

One of Plaintiff April Gallop’s attorneys, William Veale, didn’t know whether to relate the decision to “Kafka, Orwell, Carroll, or Huxley,” referring to the absurdity and dearth of reason emanating from the court regarding the deadliest attack on U.S. soil the nation has ever faced.

“The Court’s decision, analogous to reviewing an Indictment in a liquor store hold-up without mentioning the guy walking in with a gun, refuses to acknowledge even the existence of the three defendants much less what they were doing that morning or saying about it afterwards,” Veale added.

Of the three judges on the panel, John Mercer Walker, Jr. is first cousin of former President George H.W. Bush and first cousin once removed of George W. Bush, who used 9/11 to manipulate public emotion to support passage of the unconstitutional PATRIOT Acts and waging illegal wars of aggression in the Middle East. According to Wikipedia, Walker shares a grandfather with the 41st president, George Herbert Walker, whose daughter married Prescott Bush. A motion to force Judge Walker’s removal from the case was denied, despite a clear conflict of interest.

The lawsuit, prepared by the Center for 9/11 Justice, accuses the defendants of conspiring to facilitate the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that killed 3000 Americans and which has resulted in the deaths of many more, due to the toxicity of the clean-up conditions at Ground Zero. The plaintiff and her son were both injured in the attack on the Pentagon, multiple videos of which the government has refused to release to the public.

Ignoring crucial evidence like the total collapse of WTC7 though not hit by a plane on September 11, the whereabouts of and statements made by the Defendants on 9/11, and the presence of thermitic material in the rubble of the Twin Towers, the court ludicrously affirmed the lower court’s finding that the case was “not plausible” and “the product of cynical delusion and fantasy.”

Additionally, the court filed an Order to Show Cause for Sanctions amounting to $15,000 for filing a “frivolous” suit, which the Center for 9/11 Justice plans to appeal.

Meanwhile, nearly 1,500 professional architects, engineers and scientists continue to assert the physical impossibility of all three World Trade Center buildings collapsing in near free fall as a result of burning jet fuel. Indeed, it is the government’s conspiracy version which is implausible, “fanciful, fantastic and delusional.”

The bravery of April Gallop in her attempt to expose the truth is as laudable as the obvious official corruption is contemptible. An unbiased judicial review of the events surrounding 9/11 will not be found in the United States. But refusal to do so only heightens global suspicion. The conspiracy and cover-up was so poorly executed that the vast majority of the planet’s population doubts the official version of events.

This is either just another scare tactic or the set up for a false-flag terror attack, nothing else...

Wikileaks:A Nuclear Bomb Hidden In Europe

Secret files have revealed that terrorists claim to be hiding a nuclear bomb in Europe, according to WikiLeaks.
An al-Qaeda commander claims that a such a dirty bomb will apparently be detonated if Osama bin Laden is captured or assassinated.

The files also reveal only one in three detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp was classed as a dangerous terrorist.

About half were foot soldiers and one in five was innocent.

The documents, shown to a number of newspapers, detail the interrogations of the 780 people who have passed through the US detention camp in Cuba.

Information that they provided during interrogations is also listed. About 220 of those detained were assessed as dangerous international terrorists, while about 380 are judged to be lower-level troops.

At least 150 people were held and assessed but released because of a lack of evidence, according to the files.

More than 100 al-Qaeda terrorists are said to have been held at the centre, the most senior being Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

He is accused of masterminding the 9/11 attacks and faces a military tribunal this year. Sheikh Mohammed’s file is said to state: ‘Detainee had numerous plots and plans for operations targeting the US, its allies, and interests worldwide.

‘Targeting priorities were determined by initially assessing those that would have the greatest economic impact, and secondly which would awaken people politically.’

Sheikh Mohammed is said to have told interrogators al-Qaeda would unleash a ‘nuclear hellstorm’ and planned to recruit staff at Heathrow airport.

The Guantanamo Bay centre was opened by the US government four months after the 9/11 attacks and holds about 180 people at present.

Torture-style techniques were used there during the Bush administration.

Tornadoes are caused by warm and cold air coming together. If the air was warmer there would be no drastic disturbance. Last April when the atmosphere was about 1 degree warmer we had had very few tornadoes. This year the air mass coming in from the North and meeting with the air mass coming from the South is cooler. Thus more of a disturbance. The earth is cooling not warming...

Top Climate Scientist on Tornadoes: 'Irresponsible Not to Mention Climate Change'

In the opinion of top climate scientist Dr. Kevin Trenberth, it's "irresponsible not to mention climate change" in the context of the killer tornadoes this week in the South.

It is irresponsible not to mention climate change. ... The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are occurring has changed from human influences (global warming). Tornadoes come from thunderstorms in a wind shear environment. This occurs east of the Rockies more than anywhere else in the world. The wind shear is from southerly (SE, S or SW) flow from the Gulf overlaid by westerlies aloft that have come over the Rockies. That wind shear can be converted to rotation. The basic driver of thunderstorms is the instability in the atmosphere: warm moist air at low levels with drier air aloft. With global warming the low level air is warm and moister and there is more energy available to fuel all of these storms and increase the buoyancy of the air so that thunderstorms are strong. There is no clear research on changes in shear related to global warming. On average the low level air is 1 deg F and 4 percent moister than in the 1970s.

Even while bombing and killing people overseas, the federal government hasn’t forgotten its important role of being a daddy for the American people. According to an article in today’s New York Times, the Food and Drug Administration is issuing rules directed to food companies that target children in their advertising. Since child obesity is a national problem, the FDA is telling the companies that they had better get their act together and stop promoting unhealthy foods to the nation’s children … or else.

Wouldn’t you think that what children eat should be a responsibility of parents? Shouldn’t a kid’s diet fall exclusively within the realm of family decision-making?

Not when people are living under a nanny state. And hey, it’s not as if the federal government is watching over only the nation’s children. It’s also the daddy for American adults — people whom federal officials look upon as child-adults — that is, adults who must still be treated by the state as children.

Isn’t that what the drug war is all about? Doesn’t the federal government possess the authority to punish child-adults for putting unhealthy things into their mouths? Can’t a child-adult be sent to his room in a federal penitentiary for several years if he’s caught violating the government’s drug laws?

Consider country singer Willie Nelson. He recently got busted for possession of marijuana at one of the federal government’s notorious Soviet-like immigration checkpoints inside the United States. He’s 77 years old but the government is still his daddy, punishing him for possessing (and ingesting) substances that our daddy says are bad for us.

But lest you think that the government’s role as our daddy is limited to dangerous drugs, not so. The government watches over the nutrition needs of his adult-children as much as he does his children. After all, the adult children are suffering from obesity too, right?

Recently the FDA issued rules to chain restaurants directing them to publish nutrition information, including calorie counts, to their customers, including the adults. That sort of thing couldn’t be left to consumers to request restaurants to do because irresponsible, fat child-adults might not request it. So, our daddy had to step in and take care of us by forcing the restaurants to tell us what we might not want to know.

Of course, the logical next step would be to impose punishments on the child-adults themselves if they fail to make responsible decisions after being advised of the nutrition information. Perhaps a sentence ranging from 1- 10 years in jail would be appropriate, depending on how many pounds overweight the child-adult is. Why not? If they’re going to put people into jail for ingesting unhealthy drugs, why not the same for ingesting unhealthy foods?

What the FDA is doing perfectly reflects the mindset of the statist, of the collectivist. It is a mindset that views people as drones in a bee hive, existing to serve the greater good of the hive. If a drone doesn’t take care of himself, he isn’t being as productive as he could, which hurts the hive.

The idea of keeping people healthy is that people in the private sector need to be productive citizens in order to provide the tax sustenance needed by the welfare-warfare state to wage its wars and provide its welfare. A citizen that isn’t taking care of himself is hurting “society,” which hurts the machinery of the welfare-warfare state.

Let’s keep in mind that our nation was founded under libertarian principles that rejected the paternalistic state. The Framers believed that people should be free to decide for themselves how to live their lives and raise their families. They understood that being taken care of by the state constituted slavery and that freedom entailed making one’s own decisions in harmony with others in the marketplace. It’s a heritage that Americans of today should revisit.

Amateur Adobe User Easily Finds Obama's Birth Certificate to be Fraudulent (Video)
We really wanted to avoid the story of Obama's birth certificate altogether, as we view it as a petty distraction from what is taking place in the world. However, this amateur Adobe user in the video below seems to have easily found the document to have multiple layers of fraudulent tampering. Perhaps we are feeding the manufactured birther frenzy by posting this, but it's just too intriguing not to post. Surely any real journalist can find the same evidence of tampering. Watch and decide for yourself.

New US Security Appointments and The Dangerous Separation of State and Military

Tony Cartalucci
The latest game of Washington musical chairs expects to see General David Petraeus head the CIA while current CIA Director Leon Panetta is to take over Robert Gate's position as Secretary of Defense. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) astutely noted that this arrangement further blurs the lines between America's "intelligence community" and the role of the US Armed Forces.

To call the CIA an "intelligence agency" is entirely a misnomer. In reality, the CIA has become an extra-legal private military that has waged secret wars for decades. It has been recently augmenting its repertoire with pilotless drones to carry out air campaigns along the Afghan-Pakistani border. The CIA has also been involved in on-going military operations inside of Iran, Somalia, and now Libya. The CIA's ever expanding budget has long been categorized as "classified" and therefore entirely unaccountable to both the American tax payers and their so-called elected representatives.

The CFR's article, "Crumbling Wall Between the Pentagon and CIA" notes that the CIA's growing influence is due to "its greater integration with the military." This "greater integration" will engender the US military with less oversights and more secrecy as it expands its support for the CIA's growing role in waging global war.

As the lines blur between the US military and this private, secretly funded army we can expect the worst of both worlds to be combined, with the US military already conducting extra-legal operations in Libya in tandem with the CIA, with absolutely no Congressional oversight or even so much as token approval given. If the US military and CIA are not accountable to the American tax payers or their elected representatives, who are they accountable to?

The short answer is global corporate-financier interests. These are the entities that create, fund, and supply a steady stream of resources to private international think-tanks that shape and peddle what ultimately becomes US, and to a greater extent, "Western" foreign and domestic policy. The move toward "international law" and "international institutions" being the ultimate arbiters of Western progress, leaves the future of an increasing number of nations under the control of unelected, often largely unknown corporate-financier oligarchs. General Petraeus himself was a Council on Foreign Relations member as of 2009.

Operations in Libya within the greater "Arab Spring" is just one example of what we can expect, as policy planned in the shadows of secrecy are piecemeal revealed and sold to the public by a complicit corporate-owned media, and carried out by an increasingly unaccountable military-intelligence-industrial complex. The usurpation of personal and national sovereignty is not solely a matter of foreign policy. Americans need only look back to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the extra-legal collection of legal firearms, the extra-legal deployment of military troops in direct violation of Posse Comitatus, along with entirely illegal and illegitimate private mercenaries roving the streets of New Orleans. This is only the beginning of what is becoming a truly dystopian nightmare.

As people continue to wake up and call for accountability, even the scant illusion of such accountability will be systematically taken away. Such accountability will continue to ebb as long as the corporate-financier oligarchy continues to hold the power and resources we literally depend on to live. The US Constitution specifically put arms in the hands of citizens and the duty to declare war in the hands of elected representatives to prevent what is happening this very day. This dangerous separation of state and military represents another aspect of American government taking the unmistakable shape of absolute tyranny.

In the face of such unaccountable power mongering, the answer is to usurp in turn the power of these corporate-financier oligarchies, built upon over a century of our own ignorant complicity. By boycotting and replacing their system, purchase-by-purchase, house-by-house, community-by-community, we will erode the foundation upon which they wield such ever-expansive unwarranted influence. From their fiat financial system, to their factory farms, to their monopolistic industrial practices that stand like a brick wall in the way of real technological progress, everything they have commandeered has become a bane to our existence and an exercise of control over us. We have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking these responsibilities back into our own hands, lest this corporate army, unaccountable to the people, becomes the enforcer of this increasingly neo-feudal system.

Three of the Senate’s most enthusiastic hawks, Sens. John McCain (R – AZ), Joe Lieberman (I – CT), and Lindsay Graham (R – SC) have issued a joint statement on Thursday demanding that President Obama publicly order Syrian President Bashar Assad to resign immediately.

The statement made copious references to Libya, which the United States launched a war against last month, and insisted that President Obama should take the same stance that “it is time for Assad to go.”

Whether this is an explicit call for a war is a matter of some debate, as Sen. McCain was rejecting the notion earlier this week. Sen. Lieberman, on the other hand, has been calling for a war in Syria since late last month, saying Libya set a precedent for such an attack.

By Josiah HughesThough best known as the drummer of Fugazi, Washington, DC-based busybody Brendan Canty is an accomplished composer, multi-instrumentalist and filmmaker. In the time since his Fugazi days, he has developed TrixieFilm with his creative partner Christoph Green, creating a studio responsible for the Burn to Shine DVD series and concert films for bands such as Death Cab for Cutie, Eddie Vedder and myriad others.

Among the most exciting new projects for Trixie is one focusing on Wilco's Solid Sound Festival, which this year will be filmed by Canty and Green. The fest takes place in North Adams, MA, from June 24 to 26 and, along with Wilco, will include performances from Thurston Moore, Jamie Lidell and Sic Alps, among others.

"We're taking a bunch of cameras and filming that," Canty says. "It's kind of this arty festival, not a giant one... They go up to this art museum and they do installations up there and the bands perform in different parts of it. We're going to try to attack that problem and make it into a film that documents the whole atmosphere of the thing."

And while no firm release plans have been set for the Solid Sound Festival film, Canty has more than enough upcoming projects to keep Trixie busy. This is much in thanks to his reputation for crafting well-made concert films after decades of being a performer onstage himself. "You want to get in there and capture the thing that's interesting about somebody who's performing," he explains. "Whether that's their hands or face. Whatever that intensity is. Getting intimate with the subject is one thing you can't get enough of. I really appreciate the muscle work of every individual performer as opposed to just the giant stadium overblown atmosphere of rock... That's really the whole job I think, is breaking it down to the simplest form of just showing somebody doing their work."

While Trixie has spent the last few years in full-on concert film mode, the company hit a brick wall with the Burn to Shine DVDs. The series, which sees local musicians from a specific city perform in a building scheduled for demolition, produced four DVDs in the mid-2000s. The filmmakers also shot Burn to Shine instalments for Atlanta and Louisville as well, but those were never released. Canty explains that it was more a shift in priorities and the tragic loss of Touch and Go's distribution arm.

"Losing Touch and Go was hard because I've known Cory [Rusk], the owner, since I was 16 years old or so," he recalls. "I'm really used to working with people that I'm friends with. We're just trying to get that thing back on its feet."

With distribution now secured through the MVD Entertainment Group, Canty says he's "confident the Louisville one will be going to print in the next few months." Sales of that DVD will determine when and how the Atlanta edition is released.

As for more new editions of Burn to Shine, however, the project will remain on hiatus for now. "I need to carve some time out of my life. Right now if we filmed one it would just sit on the shelf for months; I don't have time to edit it. We're just going to have to find time to do that."

I climbed this mountain in North Carolina with Dutch right after publishing “Beyond the Door” on Monday. Even after all the devastating information I have been publishing about the nuclear disaster, I was shaken. It is not easy to understand the implications and follow the math of what is happening in the northern hemisphere but let’s try.

One can go absolutely crazy trying to track and understand units of radioactivity and by the end of this article I hope to have made it comprehensible. Fortunately for me physics was my favorite subject and I did teach a semester of it in a technical college many years ago in Maine. So confusing though are the many different units that even for me the challenge is daunting. (Actually I will get around to a physics lecture in another essay.)

Bottom Line: 10,000 terabecquerels (10,000,000,000,000,000 becquerels) of radioactive substances will be released into the atmosphere from the plant during the coming three months, according to simple calculations based on the estimated emission rate as of April 5. It is now safe to assume that there will be a lot of radiation circling at high altitudes and all that stuff is going to come down everywhere eventually, especially when it rains or snows. Where is all this radiation coming from?

Amounts of radiation as far as 60km from the
Fukushmia nuclear power plant have measured
far above the levels measured in Chernobyl.
Dr. Chris Busby

“I’ve been studying overhead photographs of Fukushima. It is very disturbing,” said Robert Alvarez, formerly a senior policy adviser at the Energy Department under Clinton. “The steel wall of the pool seems to show damage. All the surrounding equipment, including the two cranes, has been destroyed. There is smoke coming from reactor No. 3, and steam coming from the spent-fuel pool next to it. That indicates that the water in the pool is boiling.

“And that means the spent-fuel rods are getting hot and could start burning. If the rods start to burn, huge amounts of radioactive material would be released into the atmosphere and would disperse across the northern hemisphere. Unlike the reactors, spent-fuel pools are not—I repeat not—housed in any sort of hardened or sealed containment structures. Rather, the fuel rods are packed tightly together in pools of water that are often several stories above ground…” continued Alvarez.

Dr. Chris Busby said that three spent-fuel pools have burned, which he calculates puts the radiation levels at 24,000 Hiroshimas x 3 spent-fuel pools, or 72,000 times the radiation of Hiroshima now in the atmosphere. This amount represents only that from the spent-fuel pools. Radiation will continue to escape from the reactors until entombed. Perhaps it would have been better if we had fought a limited nuclear war instead!

What’s the official story? Radioactive levels were about 250 times higher than a month before. TEPCO said the levels of caesium-134 and -137 increased about 250-fold and iodine-131 increased about 12 times compared with one month ago, after the accident had already happened. The water level in the No. 4 reactor’s turbine building rose by 20 centimeters in 10 days. TEPCO has detected 8,100 becquerels of caesium-137 and 7,800 becquerels of caesium-134 per cubic centimeter in the water in the turbine building’s basement. The utility company said on Tuesday the 26th of April that the water level in the tunnel of the No. 3 reactor rose by 10 centimeters over three days.

Of course all this radiation at the plant is hampering work to bring the accident under control. If trends continue it might easily become impossible to approach the plant meaning the chances of ever getting the disaster under control are decreasing with each passing week.

Most of us are in shock—the consequences are so dramatic and will be with us for so long it is beyond most people’s psychological capacity to deal with the full reality, and governments are happy to assist in ensuring that we stay in our comfort—not panic—zone.

We are in the middle of a planet-changing historic event that has extinction of life written all over it, and the best evidence we have of this is actually seen in the complete censorship of hard facts about this nuclear disaster by the media and our government...

Have you ever wondered about standard banking practices that seem to make no sense? Well, consider these:

A bank will accept a car or house as collateral for a loan but not the furniture you just purchased using a bank-issued credit card. What does the bank know that you are not being told? Is it that the furniture is not worth nearly what you have just paid for it? If it were, wouldn't it serve as collateral?

Or this: a person goes to a bank and applies for a loan. S/he is asked to show that her/his debt to income ratio lies at or below one designated by the bank. Perhaps the debt cannot be more that 40 percent of income. Sometimes the bank claims that even lending at that ratio is risky, but is willing to grant the loan at an interest rate greater than what borrowers with better ratios can qualify for. The higher interest rate is supposed to compensate the bank for the risk.

People have accepted this explanation for eons, but it can't possibly be true. The higher interest rate is mathematically equivalent to reducing the borrower's income which, in turn, increases the borrowers debt to income ratio and would disqualify her/him for a loan. Furthermore, the bank granting the loan has no control over the borrower after the loan has been granted. The borrower can, for instance, go out the next day and buy a car, utterly destroying the income and debt ratio s/he had presented to the bank. Nothing about this practice makes any logical sense. If the bankers were truly concerned about lowering the risk, the logical thing to do for a risky borrower would be to lower the interest rate, not increase it. So what is this charade all about?

Applying for a mortgage involves the same practice but even more so, because mortgage lending yields huge profits. A mortgage lender's profit is often 100 or more percent of the loan because of the way interest is calculated. But where did the formula that American banks use for calculating interest originate? The names of mathematicians are often associated with the formulas they invented or discovered. Remember the Pythagorean Theorem? But the formula used to calculate interest is named after no one. Was s/he ashamed of having devised it?

In truth, an infinite number of formulas could be used for such calculations, so why is one and only one used in the U.S.? After all, when Moses descended Mt. Sinai toting engraved stone tablets, the formula for calculating interest was not inscribed on any of them. But the answer can be found by looking at the essence of lending and borrowing.

In centuries past, philosophers wrote much about essences. Not so anymore. But revealing essences uncovers things about concepts that are otherwise kept hidden. For instance, the essence of lending/borrowing is very simple The following three examples reveal it:

(1) A neighbor asks to borrow a cup of sugar. The lender supplies it, the borrower uses it while baking, directly satisfying a human need, and later returns an equivalent amount of sugar to the lender. (2) A neighbor asks to borrow a lawnmower. The lender supplies it, the borrower uses it to mow his lawn and later returns it to the lender. (3) A coworker who has left his wallet at home asks to borrow ten dollars for lunch. The lender supplies it, and the borrower buys lunch with it and later returns ten dollars to the lender. These are examples of ordinary, everyday, lending and borrowing.

The essence of this concept consists of four things: a lender, a borrower, something that passes back and forth between them that directly serves a real human purpose, and the lender retains ownership of the thing lent. The lender exacts no premium (fee, profit) for having made the loan. It is a simple transaction between one human being and another in order to enable one to satisfy a human need that would otherwise have gone unsatisfied.

When bankers engage in a practice they call lending, the practice is completely different and has a different purpose. Bankers always exact a premium, a fee. What bankers do is really a form of renting; it is not lending, and the way the amount of rent is calculated is really troublesome.

The three ordinary cases of lending mentioned above can easily be altered to fir the banker's case: The amount to be repaid equals the amount lent plus interest). In the ordinary examples above, the premium (interest) equals zero. But the premium is determined in different ways in different countries or for different types of loans. (See economist Tim Madden's most revealing article.) In fact, the way banks in the U.S. calculate mortgage interest is illegal in Great Britain because the stated interest rate is deceptively lower that the actual interest rate being charged.

Anyone with even modest mathematical talent can devise numerous ways of calculating premiums. In fact, numerous ways are quite well known. There is fixed interest (some constant number), simple interest, compound interest, effective interest (used in Great Britain), nominal interest (used in the U.S.), etc. So the ultimate question is, Why so many ways of determining the same thing? The answer, of course, lies in the amount of profit the lender is willing or allowed to extract from the borrower. So why is nominal interest used in the U.S.? Because the effective rate is always higher than the stated nominal rate. So, at a 6 percent nominal rate, for instance, the borrower actually pays the lender 6.17 percent back in interest. In other words, the nominal rate enables lenders to extract the highest amount of interest. That difference may not look like much, but as the interest rate is increased, the difference increases geometrically. The use of the nominal method was required by Congress in 1968 in, believe it or not, the Consumer Protection Act. Why did the Congress do that? I don't know, but I know it was not done because the members of Congress were representing their common constituents' interest.

A revelation lies in this situation that every American should be aware of. In the common lending/borrowing situation illustrated above, the lender acts to help a fellow human being satisfy a human need. Bankers don't do that; they don't care about people or their needs. Their only concern is profit and they're going to attempt to extract it whether it helps or harms human beings. Bankers do not mortgage houses to provide homes for people, they mortgage houses to extract profit, and if the borrower for one reason or another defaults, bankers show no willingness to work with borrowers so they can keep their homes. Borrowers are merely evicted, losing everything they have invested in the house.

As far as risk is concerned, bankers providing mortgages are doing exactly what the bankers described in the second paragraph of this piece are doing. The higher the interest, the riskier the loan. Increasing the interest is mathematically equivalent to reducing the borrowers income. So although bankers say they need all the information about income to debt ratios to determine the riskiness of the loan, they are in fact deliberately using it to make all loans riskier. As a matter of fact, Roger Farmer, chairman of the economics department at UCLA, says, "The most successful bank is the one that takes on the most risk." And "Risk is an integral part of the engine of capitalist growth." So the bankers who brought down the economy with the housing bubble were not doing anything new or unusual. They were doing what bankers have always done; they just lost control of the process.

These little scenarios prove that the American economy and government do not exist for the sake of the American people; they are not meant to enhance the condition of American lives; they exist only to allow for the accumulation of capital in the hands of financiers who have absolutely no concern for the lives and welfare of the nation or its people.

This process of accumulation does not even have a single human purpose. It is nothing but a world-wide Monopoly game played just for the playing. The lives of those who play this game have no human meaning. Sometimes those who play come to realize the human meaninglessness of it and attempt to relieve their consciences by trying to find "worthwhile" causes to which to donate their "winnings." These robber barons realize that this vast wealth can not buy them or anyone else anything that satisfies an authentic human need, so they hope that they can buy some great discovery, like a cure for cancer or malaria, to give meaning to their lives.

This situation can be likened to life in an anthill.

Ants form colonies made up of one or more fertile females (queens), fertile males (drones), and sterile wingless females of workers, soldiers, and other specialized groups. The queens continually lay eggs and the workers and soldiers continually fight and forage without ever wondering why. And when workers or soldiers fail to return to the hill, no ant of any class cares. No search parties are ever organized, no grief is exhibited, no notice is taken. Ants are not hatched and do not work to enhance the condition of formicidal life. Ants do what ants do just because they do it, not for some formicidal purpose. So too with bankers. Their magnificent human brains have enabled them to attain the heights of insects.

The trouble is, the entire economy functions in the same way. Supplying people with needed products or services is not any vendor's goal; extracting profit is. That's why bankers won't accept the furniture mentioned in the first paragraph of this piece as collateral. Furthermore the entire American commercial code centralizes this purpose and protects the rights of vendors to engage in it. That's why in a commercial bankruptcy, the bankrupt company's assets go first to commercial and last to human creditors. It's why companies can sell you products that don't work but you can't buy products with checks that don't work. You can't even buy products that don't work with checks that don't work. It's why the Fed exists and why bankers and companies get bailouts but people don't. It's also why no banker will ever go to jail for the fraud committed in the housing collapse and the foreclosure scandals. What most people view as fraudulent activity is, in fact, what America does, and what America does is done for the sake of money, not for the sake of people. It's why the maxim is let the buyer, not the vendor, beware. But if the economy were designed equitably, no one would need to beware. Buyers are told to beware because even the legal system recognizes that the economy cheats. In fact, if questioning the practices of bankers were allowed, the entire basis of the "American way of life" would be called into question, and the legal system cannot allow it.

Jefferson recognized two things that America's history has proven to be true: "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency . . . the banks and corporations . . . will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." (In 2009, 43.6 million people were living in poverty.) And, "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." (U.S. multinational corporations . . . cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million.) So Jefferson's claims have come to be because of these practices that we call an economy.

President Obama has said that he will not allow people-programs to be cut so that the wealthy can receive tax cuts because our nation is "better than that." Is it? Really? Well, just watch and see.

Vague talk about this culture's values is prevalent. But values are made evident not in what people say, but, as Emerson writes, in what they do. ("What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.") This culture has but one value, and it is not people, their lives, or their welfare. It's the accumulation of capital acquired by hook or crook.

In his deficit reduction speech given at George Washington University, the President acknowledged that that this was the America he believed in when he said that, "From our first days as a nation, we have put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America's wealth and prosperity." Unfortunately, people who make claims using the Pontifical "WE" are usually dissembling. Just who does the "we" refer to and when were they given a choice? Furthermore this acknowledgement clashes with the rest of what the President said: "The America I know is generous and compassionate. It's a land of opportunity and optimism. Yes, we take responsibility for ourselves, but we also take responsibility for each other. . . . That's who we are. This is the America that I know. . . . We will all need to make sacrifices. But we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in." But exactly which America is that? The lying, thieving banker's America or the difficult to identify compassionate one?

What America is cannot be distinguished from its economy. The economy is deeply embedded in the American legal system. There are not two things, a country and an economy. They are identical. Numerous people have made suggestions for improving this political economy and most of them would ameliorate the nation's problems. But what few realize is that tinkering with this economy cannot solve its problems. An economy whose primary concern is not the welfare of the people it serves will always require the people to live and die for some non human goal. The people will be used just like worker ants, and no one will really care when they fail to return home alive. To be subordinated to some non-human purpose is to be expendable.

Obama Working “Under The Radar” To Sneak Attack Second Amendment Paul Joseph Watson

According to a little noticed quote in the Washington Post earlier this month which has attracted virtually no media attention, President Obama told gun control advocate Sarah Brady that his administration is working “under the radar” to sneak attack the second amendment rights of American citizens.

During a March 30 meeting between Jim and Sarah Brady and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, at which Obama “dropped in,” the president reportedly told Brady, “I just want you to know that we are working on it (gun control)….We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”

The quote appeared in an April 11 Washington Post story about Obama’s gun control czar Steve Croley.

“What is truly startling about this story is the way it has been totally ignored by the rest of the media,” writes Jeff Knox….”Even the folks at the Brady bunch are not spreading the news about the stunning reassurances from the president. There is nothing on their website discussing or even mentioning Obama’s chat with Jim and Sarah.”

The Obama administration has repeatedly invoked rhetoric about the flow of guns being smuggled from the U.S. into Mexico as a talking point with which to chill gun rights of American citizens.

Just months into his term in the Oval Office, Obama told Mexican President Felipe Calderon that the U.S. was to blame for much of Mexico’s drug violence because of firearms that were purchased in America.

“I will not pretend that this is Mexico’s responsibility alone. The demand for these drugs in the United States is what’s helping keep these cartels in business,” Obama told Calderon during a press conference. “This war is being waged with guns purchased not here, but in the United States. More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.”

However, it was recently revealed that the U.S. government itself was responsible for smuggling guns over the border which ended up directly in the hands of Mexican drug lords. Under operation “Fast and Furious,” the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives “Sanctioned the purchase of weapons in U.S. gun shops and tracked the smuggling route to the Mexican border. Reportedly, more than 2,500 firearms were sold to straw buyers who then handed off the weapons to gunrunners under the nose of ATF.”

The ATF claimed the program was an effort to identify criminals by seeing where the guns ended up, but once across the border, “the agency seemed to lose track of the weapons,” reports Laura Carlsen. The firearms ended up in the hands of Mexico’s ruthless crime gangs and have been used to kill U.S. border agents and other innocent people.

When confronted on the issue, Obama simply denied all knowledge of the program.

In addition, as we reported earlier this week, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, the “logistical coordinator” for a top Mexican drug-trafficking gang, Sinaloa, that was responsible for purchasing the CIA torture jet that crashed with four tons on cocaine on board back in 2007, also obtained guns from the U.S. that were later used to kill people in Mexico City. Niebla recently told the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago that he has been working for the U.S. government since January 2004.

Despite these revelations, the Obama administration is still pushing ahead with a proposal to force gun dealers in Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and California to report the sales of two or more semi-automatic rifles to the same person at one time or during any five business days directly to the the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Could the plan to make gun dealers in these four states report to the government who is purchasing firearms be part of the sneak attack Obama promised Brady last month?

Obama attracted the fury of gun rights activists in 2008 when he said that Americans frustrated with the declining economy “cling to guns or religion” as a means of relieving their stress.

US meteorologists warned Thursday it would be a mistake to blame climate change for a seeming increase in tornadoes in the wake of deadly storms that have ripped through the US south.

"If you look at the past 60 years of data, the number of tornadoes is increasing significantly, but it's agreed upon by the tornado community that it's not a real increase," said Grady Dixon, assistant professor of meteorology and climatology at Mississippi State University.

"It's having to do with better (weather tracking) technology, more population, the fact that the population is better educated and more aware. So we're seeing them more often," Dixon said.

But he said it would be "a terrible mistake" to relate the up-tick to climate change.

The tornadoes that ripped through the US south this week killed over 250 people, in the worst US weather disaster in years, with residents and emergency workers sifting through the rubble on Thursday.

Violent twisters that famously rip through the US south's "Tornado Alley" are formed when strong jet winds bringing upper-level storms from the north interact with very warm, humid air mass from the Gulf of Mexico, said David Imy from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

On Wednesday, a particularly potent storm was whipping up around the heart of that tornado-prone corridor where the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, eastern Texas and northwest Louisiana meet, noted Kristina Pydynowski, a senior meteorologist at the AccuWeather.com website.

Sparking the severe thunderstorms from that point was the much warmer air arriving from the south, over the tropical Gulf. The combining winds at differing altitudes, said Pydynowski, created "significant twisting motion in the atmosphere, allowing the strongest thunderstorms to spawn tornadoes."

Such a mixture would not be prevalent along the US eastern seaboard, so rough weather in that region Thursday would not also spawn tornadoes, at least on the same scale, she said.

Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), also dismissed Thursday climate change as a factor in the deadly tornadoes: "Actually what we're seeing is springtime," he said.

"Many people think of Oklahoma as 'Tornado Alley' and forget that the southeast United States actually has a history of longer and more powerful tornadoes that stay on the ground longer."

Wednesday's deadly tornadoes, according to Imy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were unusual for being "long track," meaning they were on the ground for a longer period of time than usual -- in this case, roiling across the land for 30 miles (48 kilometers) or more.

An average track would be less than five miles, said Imy.

However, the stronger-than-usual tornadoes affecting the southern states were actually predicted from examining the planet's climatological patterns, specifically those related to the La Nina phenomenon.

"We knew it was going to be a big tornado year," he said. But the key to that tip-off was unrelated to climate change: "It is related to the natural fluctuations of the planet."

So I am a blogger now.

This is my entry into the world of blogging. Don't know if anyone will ever see it or care, but here it goes. I intend it be a humorous, music, sports and current issues flavored site with postings of links to my favorite videos, info about my favorite bands, stuff I find funny and things I find newsworthy. It might become political at times. I just can't help myself. I will also use this as a forum to put things out there for information and education sake. I like to expose people to alternative ways of viewing events both past and present. I never believe everything I read and don't claim to have all the answers despite what many of you who know me believe. Hence the title of my blog. I hope you enjoy it and feel free to pass on any comments.

Disclaimer:

Many of the articles I post here are taken from some of my favorite alternative news sites and blogs. I do my best to post the link to the the source of the original article as well as the author's name if it is provided. If someone notices any omission on my part or feels that they would prefer that I not post their articles here, please contact me. I try to post the work of others in bold and italics. My comments or any work that is original to me, is presented in regular type format. My intention is to pass on information I find interesting or important to others for informational and/or educational value. Again, if someone wishes that I not use their work, please contact me. I will gladly remove it and refrain from posting it in the future.